Some thoughts on Red Pill knowledge with a game design perspective

[IASGame]

In the Red Pill (RP) community, playing games is often considered a waste of time and advice goes in the direction of "read books instead". While I agree partly, I learned a lot of stuff from games (including video games) and games are better at teaching some things.
Also take into account that writing and literature has been around for centuries whereas even though games have also been around (chess, go), serious effort in game design is fairly recent, particularly efforts to leverage games to improve learning.

I find game design very interesting. Much of it is based on psychology. I recommend David Sirlin's website which has some very insightful articles. One of my first RP insights arose from reading a post of his about Nature gambling more with Men (for example, there are more lower IQ and more higher IQ men than women):
http://sirlingames.squarespace.com/blog/2011/7/24/men-and-women.html
(check the comments for some expected reactions)

Often when learning about RP, Men pass through some stages:
http://therationalmale.com/2012/07/25/the-5-stages-of-unplugging/

I've been thinking about this and the philosophy of "don't wish it was easier, get better at it" which is a philosophy I follow with difficult, well designed games.
It dawned on me that, when I play a good game that is difficult but well designed to reward skill, if I keep at it and improve it is psychologically rewarding - usually more rewarding than easy games can ever be even if they are also well designed.

But if a game is difficult as a result of poor design that doesn't really reward skill, the better option is to do something else. This is often the case with "pay-to-win" games, and is ubiquitous in mobile games with in-app purchases. This is unsurprising given that those games are increasingly designed with the goal of getting players to spend money (same applies to many old "arcade hard" games developed to be coin operated). In that sense, saying they were poorly designed is not strictly correct - the design goals are just different from the design goals of other types of games.

We do well to keep in mind that hypergamy was "designed" by evolution, and evolution's goal was not reward the males "playing the game". For better or worse though, you can not choose to play a different game in the sense that "AWALT", even though I believe the individual woman's history and personality (nature and nurture) does come into it, which reinforces the point that plate spinning is a good approach to see which individual females are better "designed" for your own goals (rather than hypergamy's goals).

The parallel with MGTOW choosing not to play, and also with spinning plates may be somewhat obvious at this stage, but I wanted to finish the post by pointing it out explicitly.
I hope this is helpful to newly RP readers with video game knowledge.

 

[sharkbeat]

While I agree partly, I learned a lot of stuff from games (including video games) and games are better at teaching some things.

The thing about video games is that most people who play video games are obsessed with video games, and that creates an obsession that disconnects them from the rest of the world. Books and movies can do the same thing. Bookworms and movie nerds exist. Comic books also create fixation.

 

[parkthebus]

The thing about video games is that most people who play video games are obsessed with video games, and that creates an obsession that disconnects them from the rest of the world. Books and movies can do the same thing. Bookworms and movie nerds exist. Comic books also create fixation.

Movie nerds to to be people that do marathon Netflix sessions. Anyway, the issue with these hobbies isnt the frequency on its own but the fact it's an unsociable hobby.